My name is Matt Nicoll and I am a high school teacher in New Zealand, interested in improving the classroom experience for my students. I am open to trialing new approaches and hope to use this blog to reflect on my ideas and practices.

Monday, 14 July 2014

How is Science Going?

I just surveyed my Year 9 Science class, and most of them still love Science, or at least enjoy it. We don't do experiments every lesson (in fact, we only have 3/4 lessons in a laboratory, anyway). On a scale from 0-10, when asked how much they enjoyed Science (disregarding how "good" they thought they were at it), the average score was 7.43. Interestingly, they do want more experiments and fewer "write-ups". They also are a bit uncertain how "good" at Science they are (6.43), but none of them think they cannot "do" Science at all (0 on the scale provided) or even really struggle (1-3).

So, where to from here? I do think I need to base the learning more around investigations so the students get the experiments they desire. I also think they are going to be out of luck regarding the "write-ups", but I am happy to accept these as videos, websites, blogs...whatever works for the students to communicate their findings.

I will be giving the students the same survey at the end of the year, by the way. I want to see how much their enjoyment, particularly, has changed. Sadly, the exam results might just make them think they are worse at "doing" Science than they really are, because I am seeing that every one of this class is starting to think like a scientist more and more, every day.